Yeah, my name’s Greg Swinden, I’m a Commander in the Royal Australian Navy and I work as a logistics officer.
Well it’s responsible for a wide range of activities; from making sure that troops are paid, nobody wants to work without getting their money, through to making sure they’re fed, getting their food to them, getting fuel for ships and aircraft, transporting them around Australia and overseas.
We were sent there in late 2001, early 2002, before combat operations in Iraq occurred, but there was always that feeling that the situation would degrade and at any time the Iraqis could do something unforseen and we would go from just monitoring the situation to suddenly, something would go wrong. And certainly we were monitoring the oil embargo that was in place at the time so we were checking any ships that were coming out of Iraq to see whether they were trying to smuggle oil out, and in several cases trying to get on board those ships was at times difficult due to barbed wire entanglements or steel posts were stuck out from the side of the vessels to prevent boarding parties going over. And in fact, as a logistics officer at one point I was put on board on of the oil smuggling ships for twenty four hours to lead a small team that was monitoring that vessel, and we had a mixture of Iraqi crew, Bangladeshi crew and Ukrainians so the three of those didn’t quite mix so they were a volatile group of people at the best of times. So we, fortunately, were armed and the level of uncertainty as to whether they would just be compliant and do as they were told or whether they would try and do something that was untoward. So there was this level of uncertainty, which didn’t quite happen with the other operations.
I think East Timor was probably the most satisfying part of my career, to go there, to put the training and skills that I had spent many years learning into practice, and to see the work that the various peacekeepers, not only from Australia but from other countries as well were doing to stabilise East Timor and to rebuild the country, and certainly Australia took a strong lead in that activity, but just getting out and seeing the local people and talking to them and finding out how life for them had improved since the peacekeeping forces had been put into East Timor. And particularly the children, the Australian soldiers or Australian personnel… whenever they were out walking around the kids would always come up to you and say hello, which they didn’t generally do to some of the other peacekeepers, I think they quickly realised what an Australian uniform looked like and they always knew that Australians were friendly people and might be good for some chocolate or lollies or something like that, and the Australians tended to be more personable and more outgoing and so the kids particularly were more than happy to come and talk to you.